Dissertation update

For the past two years, I’ve been working on a doctorate in music education at NYU. I’ve finished my coursework, and after I do my candidacy exam this fall, I’ll be ABD (All But Dissertation, as the academics say.) (Update: I passed!) I’ve spent the summer laying the groundwork for the dissertation, and thought you guys might like to know how I’m approaching such a monumental task.

So, here are the steps I’m taking. The process has worked well for all my various publications, and I’m feeling confident in it. Maybe you’ll find it useful.

First of all, if you plan to write anything long or complicated, don’t use one giant Word document. You need to be able to assemble a lot of small hunks of prose into nested folders, along with images and other media, and ideally you want the folders themselves to also function as documents. I recommend Scrivener for this purpose–I can’t imagine what I’d use if it didn’t exist.

I’m not coming to this dissertation as if it’s a blank page. I wrote a masters thesis, a bunch of papers for my courses, some book chapters and journal articles, all the posts on this blog, and plenty of casual writing on social media sites. I’ve worked out versions of my ideas at many different lengths, with varying degrees of formality, approached from a variety of angles. I chose my doctoral courses so that the term papers could all end up being part of my dissertation. I’m still struggling to assemble all those ideas into a coherent argument, but at least I don’t have to worry about how I’m going to write it up once I do figure that out.

Here’s how the actual writing has been going. First I collected sources, and lots of them: course readings, research I did for term papers and publications, items from those sources’ bibliographies, more items from those sources’ bibliographies, entire folders of PDFs shared by friends, things recommended to me by advisors and teachers and people on Twitter, and so on. I currently have 355 sources in Mendeley. At first I was collecting everything that seemed interesting for any reason, but gradually I started grouping sources into eight categories: Race, Class, Gender, Hip-hop Aesthetics, Hip-hop Pedagogy, Music Technology, Methodology, and Theory. I didn’t have all these categories ahead of time; they emerged organically out of the sorting process.

With my giant folders of sources in place, I copied and pasted the full text of each book or article into a Scrivener text file. Then, as I read through each source, I deleted everything that wasn’t of interest, until I was left with an effective synopsis and a set of key quotes. For those rare sources where this wasn’t possible, I had to transcribe quotes by hand, which was a drag. (Academic publishers! Make things easier for people like me. Put your publications online in HTML and PDF formats.) (This, by the way, is also how I produce music: I put a track into Ableton Live, delete all the boring parts, and loop up and remix the rest.)

The reading/deleting of my sources took pretty much the entire summer. Reading long and dense academic texts is hard, and it helps to be doing it with my finger on the delete key. There’s something satisfying about deleting text rather than just running my eyes over it.

Next, I went back through each text file and eliminated as much redundancy as possible, by deleting the less relevant quotes, summarizing and paraphrasing where possible, and inserting properly formatted citations. This took me about half of August, and was extremely tedious. I took frequent Twitter breaks.

With all my quotes in order, I went back through and disaggregated all the quotes and references, so instead of having a bunch of text files named for references, I had a bunch of text files named using concise summaries of their contents. This went surprisingly quickly, since I had already read through all of the sources several times each by this point.

Now the project is to organize and sequence all my little conceptual chunks. Scrivener makes this easy, because the folder hierarchy also acts as a dynamically updated outline. Once I’ve sorted all my text files, I can export the whole project as one big continuous document, add in some connective tissue, and I’ll have my literature review and methodology sections. I will also have laid a solid groundwork for a topic proposal. Then I’ll be off and running.

So now you might be wondering: what is this dissertation going to be about, anyway? That’s a tough question, and I probably won’t have a tight, concise answer until after it’s already done. But here’s what I have at the moment.

In America, music education is dominated by the Western classical tradition. The repertoire is slowly diversifying, but school music otherwise looks the same as it did in European conservatories in the 19th century: large ensembles, reading from scores, led by directors with complete authority.

Nearly all children in the US take general music in elementary school, which lays the groundwork for eventual ensemble playing. In high school, where music programs are available, they usually take the form of band/choir/orchestra. Students compete to be part of these ensembles, and the ensembles usually compete among each other, regionally and then nationally, much like sports teams.

The European conservatory model of music education is unappealing to a majority of young people in America. Among high school students who have access to elective music ensembles, at least eighty percent opt not to enroll. This majority includes a substantial number of musicians, myself included. I dropped out of school music as soon as I was able, and thought of myself as a non-musician. Nevertheless, I was curious about music. I found my way back in by teaching myself rock, blues, country, jazz, and eventually, electronic and hip-hop production. I re-entered the academy at age 35 via NYU’s music technology program. Music tech is a common point of academic re-entry for autodidactic pop musicians like me.

A few schools offer alternative forms of music education beyond classical-style ensembles, like songwriting, audio production, and “modern band.” These alternatives are growing, but they are rare. Funding and space are factors, but the most profound obstacle is the way that music teachers are trained.

University music education programs focus on the Western classical tradition to the near exclusion of all else, and whatever “popular” music they teach is typically limited to jazz and musical theater. If prospective music teachers want to learn how to make beats or DJ, they have to do it on their own time. Music teachers who do not have experience with contemporary popular music creativity will understandably have a hard time teaching it, even when they have the motivation and the resources.

The world of formal music education is a strange place for pop musicians. The priorities seem distorted and bizarre. I have met students and faculty who are deeply expert in Baroque music, but who have never heard of the blues scale; who can write 12-tone serialist compositions, but who can’t improvise; who can effortlessly sight-read a score, but who have never made a recording. And I meet people who have led extraordinary dual lives, attaining mastery of classical guitar or jazz trumpet while also learning metal shredding or turntablism. I have been especially struck by how rare it is for the formally trained musicians to have ever written a song. Rock musicians and electronic music producers start creatimg original songs early in the process. A folk singing friend says that she learned three chords and wrote fifteen somgs. Typical college music majors look to us like art majors who have never drawn a picture, or English majors who have never written a story.

Every small child makes up songs. But teaching “real” musical creativity to young people has historically been difficult. Composing on paper demands that you first master notation and some music theory. It takes substantial ability to improvise with an instrument. Studio recording on multitrack tape is technically complex and expensive. However, with the advent of personal computers, the situation has changed. Preschool-aged children can play great-sounding music using the smart instruments in GarageBand. Novices can compose by trial and error using MIDI or notation software. Recording professional-sounding tracks gets easier and cheaper with every passing year. One of the instrumental tracks on Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning album DAMN was produced with a guitar, an iPhone, and nothing else. The tools for creativity have never been more accessible than they are now. So why haven’t university music education programs leapt at the opportunity to infuse the profession with more creativity? Why not turn music class into an art class? Is all the resistance to change just institutional inertia, or are there ideological forces at work?

I started researching this material formally a few years ago, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since I washed out of classical cello in eighth grade. Why is “official” music so different from pop music? Why is the music you learn in school so different from the music you dance to? The answer to that question is complex, but I believe that there’s a single major driving force behind the split, at least in the United States: racial politics. Every major form of American popular music in the past century originates among African-Americans: jazz, blues, rock, R&B, funk, techno, and hip-hop. Over time, these musical forms have diverged steadily from European tradition. Jazz sounds different from classical music, but it uses the same instruments, the same notation system, and broadly similar technical approaches. R&B is more guitar-centric and rarely uses notation, but it still centers around an ethos of live performance. Rock uses live performance too, but ever since the Beatles, it has become a recorded form, based more on sounds and their manipulation than notes and chords. Techno and EDM abandoned instruments and “live” performance entirely. Hip-hop followed suit, and also dispensed with harmony and melody. Rap is the least European-sounding music our country has ever produced.

Rap is the most popular of the popular musics, both in the US and in the world. It continues to surprise me with its ability to combine accessibility and experimentalism, its social realism and sonic surrealism, and its high ceiling of technical virtuosity combined with a low floor for entry-level participation. Rap is also the music most alien to music education’s classical-ensemble tradition. If music education is able to open itself to hip-hop musicians, approaches, and participatory values, the effect could be transformative. Music teachers and the ensembles they lead are significantly whiter and more privileged than the school population generally. School music is impoverished by its failure to embrace both the processes and the products of the African diaspora, and students are impoverished by their alienation from the music that’s most authentic and meaningful to them. By making school music more representative of the students it’s supposed to be serving, we have an opportunity to make school itself more democratic, more just, and more empowering.

So that’s the plan. The above is all subject to refinement and redirection. This fall I’m going to be observing music educators in New York City who are using hip-hop in their classrooms. I’ll be talking to hip-hop insiders who are trying to become established in formal educational settings, and to traditional educators who are hip-hop outsiders and who are trying to find their way in. I plan to focus on high school age students–because musical identity figures so heavily in adolescent development, the stakes are high. I’ll be limited in what I can post from these observations due to privacy and ethical considerations, but I’ll share what I can. Wish me luck!